Out of Synch

The Twenty-Eighth of November Two Thousand and Twelve. Wednesday.

Time travel is complete and utter bunkum.

No, really it is. Don't even try it. I did and something like this happened:

There is no way you can get it to work in the real world and I should know. I've attempted many different experiments with little effect (there was that one occasion I jumped back five seconds, but that only happened once and let's face it, what good is five seconds to anyone?)

No, time travel is a narrative device and nothing more. You stick a pin in a moment, usually with words, but it can be pictures or film or any other recorded medium. And then you stick another pin in a bit later but you say that that pin is from before the first pin. And depending on how well you've thought about those pins it either all adds up, goes round in circles, doesn't quite add up but you get away with it because it's very satisfying or doesn't add up at all and you cry foul even though even the most thoroughly considered time travel narrative doesn't really make sense.

Do you know, this won't help but it's been ages since I've done a graph so let me chuck this one in for no particular reason:

The nearest thing there is to time travel is synchronicity - when meaningful things seem to happen at the same time. This collision of the timelines of two or more objects following their normal path through spacetime is an entirely linear phenomenon but the effect of one timeline changing another ("Aunt Margaret! What are you doing here at this entirely unexpected hour? You're supposed to be in Australia") is a form of 'changing history'. Probably.

I went to see Looper again tonight, and for all its time travel nonsense it is actually very good and as a result qualifies as my Ninth Film Recommendation. As an exercise in world building it's brilliant - the detail of the future world the story takes place in is outstanding. The performances and the direction are fantastic too, but all the time travel stuff in it is completely bobbins. Mind you, I was experiencing my own time travel problems because I was attempting to listen to the Theatrical Commentary Track from director Rian Johnson that I had downloaded to my iPod Shuffle. The idea was to listen to the commentary while in the cinema. To synch it up Johnson suggested starting the track as the TriStar logo appeared. But there was no TriStar logo! I don't know if there was one on the American release, but I was lagging a short way behind from the start. With a careful bit of fast forwarding and then pausing I eventually got it to keep pace with the film, but it went a bit out again when the reels were changed at one point. I got most of it, though and synched up in plenty of time for the climax. Which I won't reveal here now, but in an act of paradoxical time travelling I will reveal it in exactly one year's time. I hope that's enough of a spoiler warning.

In fact, here's a little bit of time travelling for anyone who is kind enough to read this particular blogdule. I will attempt to rewrite the next sentence every day for as long as I can remember.

Exactly forty-four years ago to the day, in order to memorialise the brave deeds of that mysterious group, a statue of the Termagants, cast in the peculiar metal retrieved from the wreckage of their spaceship, was erected in Nova Square.

I accidentally deleted the wrong bit of this. It originally said something about how to time travel you must make sure you have had plenty of riboflavin.

More soonliest.